Feedforward control can be considered as the most well-known control approach to deal with measurable disturbances. It started to be used almost 100 years ago, and since then it is being used in most industrial processes. It is a very simple technique that has been used typically as a complement to PID control, although it can be combined with any feedback controller. The feedforward control design has traditionally been performed assuming perfect cancellation of the disturbance signal, and when this solution was not possible because of non-realizable problems, static design solutions were usually implemented. In the last decade, this issue has been researched and analyzed, and new designs for feedforward control have appeared to face these problems. As a result, a set of new simple tuning rules have been obtained providing considerable improvements in the control system performance. This paper presents a summary of these contributions and a short history of feedforward control. The main objective is to highlight the advantages of this control approach and to provide a tutorial about a group of simple tuning rules with remarkable practical application.

(publish version available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2021.1978537)